


jeon wonwoo's invincible summer

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Jeon Wonwoo-centric, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 00:11:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15762600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Wonwoo dreams about the sea, his grandfather, and Wen Junhui.





	jeon wonwoo's invincible summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nisakomi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nisakomi/gifts).



> dear nisanis,
> 
> happy belated birthday! this was originally supposed to be completed by the holiday season, and then by your birthday, and then by wonhui day but it seems i've missed all these deadlines...  
> i wanted to give up on this fic so many times and write you something else (sputnik sweetheart au, when will i?) but then i looked and i first started writing this in sept 2016?? it's kind of hard to give up something that you've spent so much time thinking about right? right...
> 
> thank you for being so supportive and my biggest fan through these two years ♡♡♡ also thank you for, when i looked up your u/n after the comment you left me on my jamjam fic, introducing me to the wonhui ship haha it's fun being sucked into a black hole of love...heh. ilu ♡♡♡♡♡

Wonwoo wonders if he has the memory of a goldfish.

The ceiling fan whirs overhead, useless in combating the heavy heat of late June, which sticks to his back like a thin layer of paste between skin and his damp t-shirt. It's a very mundane, roundabout pattern - the blades spin, Wonwoo sweats into the floor. The hardwood cools his back but cramps his neck, and the spot on the floor slowly warms from his body heat. Shifts over until he locates a new cool part of the room. The blades spin, Wonwoo sweats into the floor. And then it goes.

He's only thinking about it because he's thinking about nothing. He's thinking there was something he should've been doing instead of lying on the floor of his apartment, mopping away the inevitable dust Jeonghan left behind once he'd finally gotten Jisoo to move his boxes for him with a _you'll miss me,_ when Wonwoo hadn't even taken off his headphones to say something about it.

"Bullshit," Wonwoo remembers he ended up replying. If he's remembering correctly. "You're just gonna be on the other side of the wall," or something along those lines. Goldfish memory, after all. He does remember that he wrote his final paper in complete silence that night, without Jeonghan's feet tapping a rhythmic pattern against his bed frame absentmindedly.

It's probably been hours since he first lay down and the back of Wonwoo's t-shirt is probably brown at the seams from the dust, bleeding down into the graphic print. Wonwoo doesn't think he's vacuumed once since his father drove him down here with all his shelves and boxes precariously stacked in the back of his uncle's van, quietly helping Wonwoo unpack all the books his mother was tired of tripping over in their house. He thinks the last thing his father told him before starting up the van again was, _make sure you vacuum the floors._ Every time his mother asks about it over the phone, Wonwoo tells her he cleans "whenever it gets bad enough" instead of telling her that he always forgot, and when he finally remembered, Jeonghan never particularly cared.

He doesn't know why he decided to lay down in the first place. It's probably got something to do with turning on the ceiling fan for the first time since last summer, thinking about how no one's cleaned the blades over the year, and wondering if the dust that's collected up there will rain down onto everything like snow.

Wonwoo can't tell what time it is anymore. It's been a while since the shadows of the whirring blades disappeared into the purple of the evening and there's an itching feeling around where Wonwoo knows he cut the tag off the back of his shirt that there was something he was supposed to do today, lost in between the little lights dancing off of a goldfish's scales, flickering around the tiny confines of a sandwich bag won at a summer carnival.

He closes his eyes and thinks he can smell the sea.

Do goldfish even have memories?

"Hey." The lights are suddenly on and directly overhead, they make Wonwoo squint. It's Junhui. He's walking past Wonwoo's spot on the floor to get to the closet, and hangs up his work smock. Wonwoo feels every step through his palms that are flat against the floor.

"Hey," Junhui says again, squatting so his face hovers over Wonwoo's. The wisps of his baby hairs are wet and stuck on his forehead from the ten minute walk back to their apartment, the faint smell of hot dogs and instant ramen stuck somewhere with the sweat. "Did you fall asleep on the floor?"

Wonwoo blinks. The ceiling fan’s back to casting shadows against the walls, beating like cicada wings. "No."

Junhui hums at that, sitting back and taking out his phone, scrolling through. Blank moments pass, ceiling fan loud between their shallow breaths, the only indication that time hadn't frozen in their silence. Time was weird like that. It couldn't be measured unless you were in motion, or looking at something in it.

Wonwoo stretches out his legs and kicks one of Junhui's boxes in the process. Maybe five seconds pass. "What time is it?" he finally asks, though he doesn't really want to know. He's probably missed dinner. He guesses he can just eat it with Junhui, then.

A toothy grin spreads across Junhui's face, almost in slow motion. A short laugh escapes his mouth right before he says, "Time for you to get up," and oh, _Junhui_ had vacuumed the floor last week once he'd finally gotten most of his things in their places, so other than the copious amounts of sweat soaking it through, Wonwoo's shirt had to be relatively clean. That's why he'd lay down in the first place.

"Fuck you."

Junhui smiles, but doesn't laugh again at that.

 

 

 

 

Every summer, Wonwoo thinks about the East Sea.

He'd grown up in Changwon-do, in the midst of the city and its dirt-tracked snow in the winter. Crisp orange leaves cracked beneath his bicycle tires on his way to school, racing one of his friends to the racks, their homeroom teacher yelling as they thundered past. His mother would bring out the fans starting in late May, while Wonwoo was doing his math homework at the dining table. But summer, summer was always sweltering in a small house ten minutes from the shore, his grandfather tiptoeing into the room Wonwoo was staying in sometime in the middle of the night and turning off the fan that he'd focused full blast towards himself, the smell of the salty sea strong as he sweat into a dreamless sleep.

When Wonwoo was very small, he remembers sharing the futon with Bohyuk, who ended up using half of Wonwoo's pillow at some point during the night, and his parent's cacophonous snores piercing the silence of night more than the whirring blades of the fan. He doesn't remember which summer it was that it became just him and Bohyuk at his grandparent's house, or when Bohyuk started up soccer so that his father was telling his grandmother _yes, it'll just be Wonwoo this year,_ both his grandparents waiting in the front yard for their family’s old silver Hyundai to come into view.

What he does remember are his grandmother's birds and his grandfather's books and the gentle silence of those summers, the distant crashing of waves always ringing through the night once Wonwoo's grandfather would turn off the fan.

When Wonwoo was very small, he and Bohyuk would reach up with their chubby hands to poke their fingers through the sides of his grandmother's bird cages, her small canaries trilling inside. By the time Wonwoo grew tall enough to take down some of the cages she'd hung from the beams of the patio, there weren't that many birds left, and he wouldn't wake up at six in the morning to their cacophonous songs.

His grandfather spent most of his days reading in his study. Sometimes, he'd let Wonwoo in after making him promise to be quiet. Sometimes, Wonwoo would pick a random book off the shelf and do his best to muddle through sentences that didn't make sense to his primary school self. And on even rarer sometimes, his grandfather would pick up a pen and the afternoon would pass just like that - small fan spinning between them, empty plate of fruit his grandmother set out for them sitting on the table, and the sound of his grandfather scratching words onto thin paper.

"He's writing a story," his grandmother told him when Wonwoo asked once. He doesn't remember what they were doing, or why it was just them. Maybe there was the scream of cicadas in the background, maybe the hum of the sea instead. "Your grandfather is a writer, you know."

Wonwoo was surprised. All his life, he'd thought his grandfather had been part of a fishing business, his grandmother a teacher. "Like the man who wrote _Sonagi?_ " he'd asked. They'd just learned about it in class that year. Maybe he was in sixth grade then.

"Like the man who wrote _Sonagi._ ” The moon, past the porchlight that moths were gathering around, had been the brightest thing in the sky that night.

When he'd went back home sometime in August, Wonwoo looked everywhere in the bookstore for his grandfather's name. It was only after they'd left, on their way to pick up Bohyuk from his soccer practice, that Wonwoo learned from the confused looks on his parent's faces: his grandfather had never written a book. How could someone who never published a book be a writer?

The next summer Wonwoo stayed with his grandparents, he read with his grandfather every afternoon except Sunday, when he would go with his grandmother to the supermarket and she'd let him pick out an ice cream. They did not talk about grandfather not being like the man who wrote _Sonagi._ Instead, Wonwoo found it embossed along the spine of a book with yellowing pages in a shelf he hadn't been able to see past until his growth spurt in the fall, and cried while reading it.

He has that book sitting in one of his bookshelves, balanced dangerously between his desk and dresser. A lot of his grandfather's books, actually, sit beside it, and if Wonwoo thinks hard enough, he can smell the salty sea faintly in their dry pages. It's been summers since he's been to his grandparents’ house, ever since his grandfather passed away and his grandmother moved to Busan to live with his uncle. They haven't seen each other much since, but Wonwoo does get a card with his grandmother's pretty handwriting every summer for his birthday.

Junhui whistled when he started moving into the room two weeks ago. He didn't have too many things that weren't already set into their permanent positions - Junhui'd been living with them for months now, after all, using the living room as his space. "A lot of books you got there," he said, sounding impressed.

Wonwoo's chest swelled. Jeonghan had always called him an old man trapped inside a twenty year old's body for having so many classics. "Yeah?" he shrugged. "You can borrow some whenever."

"It's ok!" Junhui stuttered quickly, gesturing with his hands. "I don't think I'll be able to understand very much," he explained, a nervous laugh in his voice. That's right. Junhui read E-books. Chinese books were cheaper over the internet than in the bookstores here. Wonwoo suddenly felt dumb for offering.

"Oh," he said, a beat too late. Paused again. "They were my grandfather's."

Junhui's back was to him, working on stacking up a set of drawers on top of his desk. "Hmm?" he assented, telling Wonwoo that he was listening. Wonwoo flopped back down onto his bed.

When Wonwoo was not that small, his grandfather had wiped away his tears, empty plate of fruit between them, pen still in his ink-smudged fingers. It was then that Wonwoo realized he wanted to become a writer.

 

 

 

 

Junhui's hands always smell like garlic. The thumb and his first two fingers more than the others - he chops the cloves weird. He grabs them like he would the body of an insect, if he wanted to behead harmless pill bugs and throw their cadavers into the sizzling pan he stir fries his vegetables in. Wonwoo's wondered about it before, sitting at the counter with a textbook, watching Junhui put various spices into the pan instead of studying.

Junhui would never hurt a bug, though. Actively avoids them even. When they'd walk to class together on occasion, Wonwoo noticed Junhui never walked in a straight line. It took several more instances for Wonwoo to realize that it was after the rain, or after the dew of early morning was still dark on the pavement, that Junhui was stepping around snails resting in the middle of the sidewalk. He'd grimaced when Wonwoo felt the crack of a shell underneath his right sneaker. After that, Wonwoo began watching the ground when he walked too.

"Do you want some?" Junhui usually asked whenever Wonwoo was sitting at that counter with that textbook and not reading it. He'd wave a hand in front of Wonwoo's face when he wouldn't look up at once, the one with the fingers that smelled like garlic.

Wonwoo, more times than not, scrunched his nose. "It's alright," he'd say, vague, and Junhui would lift his eyebrows and leave a small plate of vegetables in the fridge for him anyway, _Wonwoo_ written in strokes too careful to be thoughtless on the plastic wrap.

Wonwoo doesn't like garlic. But Junhui always makes food for him and he always ends up eating everything.

Ever since summer started, Junhui doesn't cook until he gets back from his part-time job at the convenience store at eleven thirty, and Wonwoo doesn't watch him mince garlic as he sits at the counter, typing away at his laptop instead. The sky stays blue for longer, Junhui starts working more hours now that he's not taking classes, and Wonwoo procrastinates until there's two or three books he hasn't read that he has to write about and turn in a paper on in thirteen hours.

It's hotter in the kitchen than it is in the bathroom, where the air conditioning broke and one of the new subletters - Wonwoo thinks his name is Seokmin - put a fan in its place. Jihoon's theory is that Seokmin must've broken it and only put the fan there out of guilty conscience, but Jihoon's also been irrationally annoyed at the subletters since one of them spilled juice on the couch. Wonwoo just laughed.

"They're nice," Wonwoo had said when Jihoon squinted at him. "Jun likes them."

Jihoon sighed, opening the door to his poorly-ventilated single room off the kitchen. "Jun likes everyone," he replied, face like he'd eaten something too sour. Wonwoo laughed some more.

"Vegetables? Sweet and sour fish?" Junhui muses aloud. Wonwoo glances up from his screen so fleetingly that when he glances back down, he can see the image of Junhui's back flash amidst the blank document he has open. Wonwoo's convinced that Junhui only "talks to himself" when someone else is in the room with him. Not really talking to himself, then.

"Both," Wonwoo suggests, feeling a smile touch his lips. He catches Junhui's _you're not helping_ look when he glances up again. It sticks behind his eyelids when he blinks.

Junhui pulls out the defrosted fish fillets. "Why do I bother asking you anyway?" he sighs. Wonwoo knows he's not upset. "You're the one who survives on expired instant ramen."

Wonwoo feels the smile grow on his face. "Stop enabling me then." Junhui's always the one bringing home one-day-past-the-expiration-date ramen from the convenience store he works at. Wonwoo just always happens to eat it all.

"There's so many preservatives in that stuff," Junhui says above the sound of him cutting fish. "Me and Soonyoung talked about it and he's decided that you're gonna die in seven years at this rate."

Wonwoo backspaces the blankness of his document, just to create noise. "Maybe they'll preserve me." He imagines it then, his entire body pickled in a jar, sitting next to the kimchi in the supermarket.

He guesses Junhui's seeing something along those lines, too. " _Gross._ "

 

 

 

 

This summer is the summer of new things.

Wonwoo doesn’t consider himself spontaneous by nature, but rather by association. It’s always Soonyoung or Junhui dragging him to coffee shops over weekends during the school year, always Jeonghan recommending new instant ramen flavors, always Jihoon buying new, on-sale brands of dish soap that end up sitting precariously next to the kitchen sink, challenging Wonwoo to use them. He always pesters Junhui to buy him the old kind with his convenience store employee discount, and Junhui just sighs and shakes his head in response.

This time, Junhui slams it on the table so Wonwoo can see it from where he’s typing on his laptop and calls it an early birthday present. The blue liquid sloshes inside.

“Oh,” Wonwoo says, not quite sure of what he should say at all. Filler words, then. “No one’s ever given me dish soap for my birthday.” Last year, Soonyoung was taking classes in the summer, too, and he’d smuggled six bottles of soju past the dormitory front desk in his backpack. He didn’t stop bragging about it for weeks.

Junhui looks like he’s going to laugh. Instead, he pulls his lips over his front teeth so Wonwoo can’t tell if he’s actually smiling or just pulling a weird face. “Well,” he coughs out. “Happy birthday, Jeon Wonwoo.” It sounds about as sincere as someone trying not to crack up can muster.

When Wonwoo’s eyes start to burn from staring at his laptop screen for too long, his eyes travel back to the dish soap still sitting next to him. It is very, artificially blue.

That’s one of the new things, Wonwoo guesses. Walking back into his dark room at three in the morning with sweat soaking the back of shirt and his burning laptop whirring in his arms, and seeing Junhui on his phone still, the bright of the screen illuminating his nose and not much else. Slipping under his covers in complete silence after he’s tripped over the extension cord snaking out from under his desk and closing his eyes just as Junhui whispers a soft _good night, Wonwoo_ towards the ceiling.

Another is no longer hearing Seungcheol’s snores on the other side of their paper-thin wall as he closes his eyes. He’d moved out sometime before his early graduation, and they all played a room swap version of musical chairs in the aftermath – Jihoon, unwilling to share a room with any of the rest of them, got the single with the small window facing the alley out back, Jeonghan moved into Seungcheol and Jihoon’s old room with Jisoo, and Junhui upgraded from the couch to the creaky top bunk Jeonghan had evacuated.

Junhui laughed when he’d tested out the ladder. It shook with every rung he climbed. “Have you ever thought about what happens if this thing collapses? And you’re sleeping on the bottom?”

Wonwoo just watched Junhui’s toes, dangling off the railing after he settled onto the bed. They were long and agile, wiggling in the air, and the toenails were at the point where they probably needed to be cut. “I did when me and Jeonghan first moved in,” he admitted. Come to think of it, maybe he needed to cut his own toenails. “Didn’t really think about it again until now.”

Every now and then, Wonwoo thinks he misses Seungcheol and his loud snoring at three in the morning. But then he wakes up the next morning actually feeling rested and just settles for the nostalgia of Seungcheol treating him and Jihoon to chicken the night after they moved in.

And then there’s Seokmin, Mingyu, and Minghao, who’re crammed into Jeonghan and Jisoo’s room for the summer. They’re all sophomores – apparently Mingyu knew Jeonghan from high school, and Minghao’s an international student from China like Junhui – and incredibly loud around ten at night, when they take a break from studying and turn the relative quiet of their apartment into chaos. That’s around the time Wonwoo moves out to the kitchen table to write. Around an hour later, Junhui’s usually home, and he and Minghao fire Mandarin back and forth to each other as Junhui does food prep for the week.

By midnight, the chaos simmers down into Seokmin singing a mix of Yoon Dohyun’s biggest hits and whatever’s popular on the radio these days over the spray of the shower nozzle. Wonwoo hears from Junhui that Mingyu’s cursed with having an early lab class every weekday, and barely sees him around aside from waiting outside the bathroom while Seokmin sings, shifting his weight impatiently.

That’s the next new thing. Jihoon’s so busy being annoyed at those three that he and Junhui coexist in peace and careful tiptoeing now.

“Do you see this?” Jihoon sighs. Wonwoo just turns his head. “How are there so many dirty dishes in the sink? Our sink isn’t even big!”

Wonwoo refrains from telling him that some of those dishes are actually his. “Hmm,” he hums, trying not to sound guilty.

Jihoon shakes his head before turning on the faucet to rinse his plate. “Why can’t you all be more like Junhui?” Junhui always washed his dishes right after he used them and cleared them out of their too-small dish rack dutifully after they were dry.

Wonwoo shrugs. “Junhui’s weird,” he suggests. And he really was – sometimes he’d stare at Wonwoo for no reason for a good five minutes before poking him in the side. It would bear more resemblance to a predator deciding its plan of attack if Wonwoo wasn’t usually sitting at the kitchen counter, or laying in his bed if that wasn’t the case, unmoving for hours.

Jihoon shuffles around the amalgamation of Wonwoo, Seokmin, Mingyu, and Minghao’s already dry dishes that’ve probably been sitting in the rack for a good week. “You’re the weird one,” he retorts without much of a pause to think about it. “At least Junhui’s clean.”

Wonwoo thinks about that. No, Junhui’s still weirder than him.

Because Junhui’s the one who entertains all his strange trains of thought, running along the rails, the scenery of a patchwork countryside flying by, only slowing to clarity once it pulls into a station before picking up speed again. With Jihoon, certified normal person, they never leave the station. With Soonyoung, they derail somewhere and end up on an airplane instead, sometimes a boat, with a _that’s cool but have you heard about..._ Wonwoo usually doesn't notice it until he's sitting in front of his laptop late into the night, trying to recall where exactly Soonyoung jumped off the track and pulled Wonwoo along with him.

“So,” Junhui says, quiet but deafening in the dark silence of their room, and it pulls Wonwoo back to what he was saying. “You said to imagine I'm at a bus station. I don't have work, or school, for several days and no one will say anything about me being gone.” A pause. “My eyes are really closed, by the way.”

Wonwoo stares at the top bunk that's too short for him to sit up properly. He's hit his head in the morning so many times that he's lost count. “You're at a bus station,” he goes on. “It has to be a bus, right? Trains are too fast and airplanes go too far...and they smell.”

“So,” Junhui repeats, patient. Wonwoo scrunches his nose in thought.

“I have this dream that one day...one day I'm gonna just ride the bus for a whole day. Without a real destination in mind.” He licks his lips to wet them. The inside of his mouth feels like he's been sucking on a cotton ball. “Maybe I'd end up in Busan, or near my old high school in Changwon. Or maybe even, I don't know, the countryside where there's a mountain, and the bus would take me to the top, and telephone poles will look like toothpicks.”

Junhui hums, urging him on. “And it wouldn't matter that I'd doze off on the way there because there isn't really a destination in mind? I'd just go on to the last stop, buy another ticket, and then go on another bus until its last stop, and then again and again until I end up somewhere that I have to search up how to get back to Seoul from, and it'd take more than two days.”

That's when Junhui speaks again. “Hmm,” he starts. Wonwoo wonders if his eyes are still closed, if all that’s moving in this moment are Junhui's lips and his chest, rising and falling with steady breaths. “I think I kind of get it. It's kind of like running away? But not really.”

They settle back into silence for a bit. Just as Wonwoo's wondering whether Junhui fell asleep on him, he continues his thought. “It's like...wanting to live a dream in real life, isn't it?” he laughs, more interested in the idea than mocking.

Wonwoo considers that. “I guess that could be it.”

“But when I dream, I never really remember the journey. I remember the destination, and why I wanna get there.” Wonwoo hears Junhui shift around the top bunk. A triangular shadow drapes itself atop Wonwoo's stomach. It takes him a good few seconds to realize it's half of Junhui's blanket, sliding off the edge of his bed.

He's so focused on Junhui's blanket that he only catches the tail end of what he's saying. “So I guess the question is: where do you actually wanna end up?”

Wonwoo doesn't really have an answer to that. He tries to think of somewhere he'd want to go but can't or hasn't for some reason, but his mind and Junhui's sleep-even breathing lull him into unconsciousness instead, like the distant crashing of waves always ringing somewhere through the night.

He dreams about the East Sea. Of the smell of the brine and the summer heat after his grandfather shut off the fan, and the old books that don't look quite right sitting in his makeshift and too-small bookshelf next to his desk, so far removed from the edge of the water.

When he wakes up, Junhui's already gone to work. The idea Wonwoo clung onto from his dreams dissipates, unsaid and unremembered, and he lays there in his bed, sweating from the sun cracking its way into the room, trying to put the feeling into words.

 

 

 

 

The feeling starts with thoughts like this:

Junhui has so many names.

“You could be a secret agent,” Wonwoo tells him once, pot of shared instant ramen empty between them, the soup still steaming. Junhui reaches his spoon into the depths even though he told Wonwoo that he thought it was too salty for him five minutes ago. “Like Tom Cruise in _Mission Impossible_ or something.”

It’s supposed to be a joke but Junhui just blinks and blows on his soup, lips shaped in a small “o.” Only after he puts the spoonful in his mouth, swallows, and exhales, all in sequence, do his teeth show in a grin. “I know martial arts, too,” he agrees, sitting taller in his seat to show his pride over the fact.

Wonwoo feels the smile tickling on his lips. “I know,” he says, digging for soup with his too-shallow spoon and tasting the powder of the flavor mix, spicy and melting against his tongue.

If you asked Wonwoo three months ago, he would’ve definitely said _Joonhwi._ Moon Joonhwi. Pause and think about it a little, and then repeat it, knowing the name probably wasn’t Korean.

If you also asked Wonwoo how he felt about Joonhwi the person around that time, he probably would've shrugged and said something along the lines of _he’s alright._

Joonhwi hadn't moved in so much by choice as by the need for them to bring down their rent. Going to university in Seoul was killer, and the landlord had taped a notice on their door two months before Soonyoung mentioned he knew someone that needed a place to live, saying the rent was going up by a quarter of what it already was.

"International student from China," Soonyoung'd said over a late lunch after one of their exams, mouth full of rice, spoon waving around animatedly. "He's nice," he added for good measure when Wonwoo continued to stare at him, not quite convinced.

Soonyoung had also referred to Seungcheol, Jeonghan, and Jisoo the same way when he brought up that they'd been looking for flatmates last summer. "Define _nice_ ," Wonwoo replied, picking at a leftover shred of seaweed that he couldn’t catch with his chopsticks. Seungcheol sometimes paid for their utilities collectively and forgot to have the rest of them pay him back, but also would eat Wonwoo's toast without asking, slices at a time, and Jeonghan didn't do any of his assigned chores, but listened carefully when Wonwoo wanted to talk about his essays, though he'd usually give him unnecessary advice on the structures of his sentences. Jisoo would buy him new toast, albeit the cheapest kind, on his grocery trips after coming home to see Wonwoo stare at the one end piece left in the bag in Seungcheol's aftermath.

Jisoo was actually nice, in Wonwoo's definition of the word. Soonyoung had shrugged, reaching over for one of Wonwoo's leftover seaweed shreds and fighting him with his chopsticks. "I don't know," he frowned, stuffing the sliver Wonwoo'd been struggling to grasp all this time onto his tongue. "Nice is just nice, you know?" A thought. "There’s really nothing more to it."

And then there was Jihoon, who too knew Soonyoung from somewhere that he couldn't keep sorted out in his memory but knew Wonwoo from the time they'd suffered through a mandatory history class together, who Wonwoo, unlike Soonyoung, also thought was nice. Nice in the sense that he minded his own business and was in charge of cleaning the kitchen, where the burners that Wonwoo would crust over with the boil-overs of forgotten ramen would always be back to shiny when he came back the next afternoon.

Soonyoung also set himself up for Jihoon’s wrath when he bugged him awake from his naps during lunchtime. "Oh," Wonwoo said even though he didn't really agree, easier to concede defeat than spend ten minutes trying to explain to Soonyoung how he felt.

"Oh," is also what Wonwoo said around a month later, when he opened the door to see mentioned international student from China, hand lingering in mid-air to knock again, standing at their doorstep with not much stuff in tow. It was a reflex rather than a beginning of a sentence.

A lengthy pause later: "You must be Joonhwi."

Joonhwi paused, too, before nodding at that, fringe bouncing with the movement. "I'm sorry I'm early," he said, Korean soft and round, before readjusting the stack of boxes in his arms. Wonwoo, upon realizing that he'd been holding them all this time, swung the door wide in a jerking motion and stepped aside to let him in. "Thanks."

“It’s okay,” Wonwoo said, stuffing one of Jeonghan’s old sneakers that he never gets around to throwing out even though he says he will all the time under the crack of the door as a stopper. Joonhwi walked sideways through the frame before pausing again in the living room, looking at him expectantly.

 _Oh._ “I’m Wonwoo, by the way.”

Joonhwi laughed awkwardly, but not unfriendly, at that. “I know. Soonyoung told me about you.” When the laugh petered out, the hint of the smile lingered on his lips. There was the sound of an absence of it and Wonwoo dug his hands into his pockets and Joonhwi moved to balance his boxes on his thigh and they just looked at each other.

 _Oh._ “The living room’s yours, by the way,” Wonwoo blurted, finally grasping at the frayed threads on the insides of his jeans’ pockets. “So you can just leave your boxes anywhere over here,” he looked toward the side of the couch where there used to be this foldable plastic endtable that Seungcheol threw into what had been Jihoon’s small single room back then – a storage place for all the shit Seungcheol had accumulated over the year and a half he'd been living there at that point, and none of them dared to open it, afraid that everything crammed inside would come crashing down once the door slid open.

Joonhwi started to shuffle over to where Wonwoo indicated. “There’s okay, too,” Wonwoo said suddenly, trying to save him the trouble. Joonhwi paused and then retraced his half-step back to finally put the stack of boxes down. He walked back out and returned with another stack, then another, and then by the third, _oh._

“I’m sorry that you’ve only got the couch,” Wonwoo told him, hefting the last few of Joonhwi’s things into his arms and leaning them against the shoe rack. “The rooms are…” he began, loosing the rest of the sentence as two pairs of Seungcheol’s shoes fell down, shaken from the weight of the bags.

Joonhwi looked up from where he’d been examining Jeonghan’s old sneaker before pulling it out and closing the door. “Yeah, no, it’s fine!” he said, waving his hands. There was a slight clumsiness in the way he spoke, tongue tripping over each syllable before regaining its footing somewhere behind his teeth, words spilling out faster than they could balance themselves. Like he hadn’t thought them through so much and sounded them out but he let them escape anyway, unsure sounds stumbling into Wonwoo’s ears. “I – uh, thanks!”

“Yeah,” Wonwoo echoed. “Let me know if you need anything.”

A lengthy pause later and already few steps down the hall: “Jeon Wonwoo.”

Joonhwi smiled, with teeth this time. “I know,” and Wonwoo got a sense of déjà vu. He pointed at himself. “Wen Junhui.”

Wonwoo only realized he should’ve said _I know_ in response when he laid in bed later that night, Joonhwi (Junhui) on the other side of his and Jeonghan’s closed door.

And then there’s:

Junhui's convenience store sits on the corner three blocks and a large intersection down the back alley of their apartment, next to this street lamp that's been flickering for what Wonwoo can only say a while now. It's blink-and-you'll-miss-it small, a couple years past outdated with a fading sign above and, occasionally, a medium-sized stray eyes him cautiously as he approaches before trotting off towards where Wonwoo assumes they keep the garbage bins.

Of course it's not actually _Junhui's_ convenience store. But every time Wonwoo decides to take a break from staring at the tiny Hangul littering his laptop screen and allow the smoggy Seoul air stick to the back of his throat instead, he finds himself at the convenience store, and Junhui's usually behind the counter, tapping the pink, worn-down nub of his pencil's eraser against his workbook. He straightens up from where he’d draped himself over the the glass top, displaying all the varieties of transit passes the store carries, and breaks out into a toothy grin once he sees that it's Wonwoo that caused the bell on the automatic doors to sound.

"Hey Wonwoo," Junhui will laugh over the blast of air conditioning at the entrance, closing the workbook with the pencil jammed between the pages, keeping his spot. He lets Wonwoo purchase things at his employee discount if Soonyoung hasn't come in earlier that day to take advantage of it already, and always offers up the cigarettes sitting in neatly arranged rows on the shelving case behind him.

"You know I don't smoke," Wonwoo usually tells him. Sometimes, he opts for giving Junhui a stone-faced look instead, which just makes him laugh. A very infectious, open-mouthed, lump-stuck-in-throat kind of laughter.

And one day: "How much for the Esses?" he shrugs and pretends to consider very seriously.

Junhui stares at him, wide-eyed and mouth open slightly, before stuttering out the beginning of the price. Wonwoo cuts him off before his tongue trips over his teeth any further. "I'm kidding."

He gets a punch in the shoulder for it, Junhui looking around for any signs of his manager as an afterthought. Instinct, then, to react to Wonwoo's bad idea of a joke. "That wasn't funny," he says. There’s a smile on his face.

Wonwoo shakes his head to hide the upturn of his lips, pays for his snacks, and slides the bag of jellies over to Junhui.

The few times Wonwoo entered the store to see someone other than Junhui at the register, he left without buying anything. Snacks weren't as appealing when Junhui wasn’t there to yell at him from the counter, directing him towards what was on sale, standing on his tiptoes to see what Wonwoo was holding up for approval barely over the shelves, and the cigarettes sitting on the shelves didn't look as orderly as they did when Junhui stood before them. Wonwoo thinks that somewhere along the way, he unconsciously started showing up only when he knew Junhui had a shift. Hence, the idea of Junhui's convenience store.

The convenience store is also where Wonwoo finds Junhui after he hasn't seen him at the apartment in two nights. It’s exams season and not unusual for Junhui to hole himself up in the library for days at a time, discreetly nibbling on the chips Wonwoo and Soonyoung’ll bring him in the stacks furthest from the librarian, frowning when Soonyoung’s face turns red from holding in his laughter and when Wonwoo just feigns nonchalance, secretly amused, every time he pulls a horrified face when he crunches too loudly.

“You guys suck,” Junhui said the last time it happened, attempting to hit Soonyoung on the head with his pencil and throwing Wonwoo his best glare when he eventually failed.

Soonyoung gave him a kissy face. “Aww, love you too, Junnie!” And, _ah_ Junnie comes from the time Junhui dared Wonwoo to pronounce his name the way he taught him five times fast with a huge wad of gum in his mouth.

“Junhui. Junhui.” He got through the first two okay. And then: “Junhui, Junnie, Junnie.”

Junnie laughed. He also laughed when Wonwoo couldn’t round his lips to sound out the _ü,_ when Wonwoo told him he didn’t want to download the keyboard for Hanja on his phone just so he could write Junhui’s name in the correct Chinese characters like Junhui kept joking he should.

“I don’t know _pinyin!_ ” Wonwoo said, a little too loud, when Junhui poked him about it again.

The resulting laugh had been awkward and bone dry. That’d been the last time Junhui brought it up.

Wonwoo thinks about this on that three-blocks-and-large-intersection-long walk to Junhui’s convenience store. He also thinks about the essay that needs to be written that’s waiting for him back at the apartment, about Jisoo’s soft voice on the other side of the wall, talking in a mix of Korean and English to his parents over the phone, and about the sounds of Seungcheol’s games throughout the apartment, the volume on his headphones up too high, and when he looks up, the automatic doors sound, and Junhui is looking up too, to look at him.

“Hey Wonwoo,” he yawns, dragging his textbook back towards him. Wonwoo waves in the place of a verbal greeting and starts down the instant meal aisle.

When he’s placed an armful of instant ramen on the counter between them: “Are you done with finals yet?” Junhui asks as he starts scanning his items. “A bag costs extra, y’know?”

“That’s Jisoo and Seungcheol,” Wonwoo replies, looking at the packets of cigarettes meticulously stacked behind Junhui. Junhui’s holding out his arm when he turns his gaze back and Wonwoo starts digging for the correct amount of bills in his wallet. “I’m done after tomorrow.”

Junhui laughs though there’s nothing particularly funny. “Me too,” he says as he puts the cash in the register. His fingers brush against Wonwoo’s palm when he hands him his change with his receipt. “I get off in ten minutes, but I’m gonna head over to the library to study all night.”

Wonwoo thinks about the sounds of Seungcheol’s games, Jisoo’s phone call that must be over now, about the way he wanted complete silence to finish the essay that’s waiting for him back at the apartment, an apartment that he’ll walk to the kitchen to and not see Junhui sprawled out on the couch, reading his textbook. “You should come back and study,” he tells him.

Junhui hums like he’s considering. Wonwoo knows he’s not. “Maybe,” he sighs.

Junhui’s been complaining about how bad Wonwoo’s posture is getting from typing away at the kitchen counter for the past few weeks, but he’s honestly not much better, deflated like this. “It’ll be quiet once everyone’s asleep,” Wonwoo continues. “And unlimited snacks.”

“Even with Seungcheol’s snoring?” Junhui smiles, raising an eyebrow. Wonwoo smiles, too, at that.

A beat later: “And Jihoon’s not home.”

He watches as Junhui stiffens from folding up his work smock. It’s only when it’s been compressed into a neat square, further rolled up and stuffed into his backpack that he seems to let out the breath he’d been holding. “It’s ok,” he says, shaking his head. “The library’s not far away, and it’s closer to campus anyway…”

Wonwoo doesn’t know how to say that he thinks Junhui needs to take a nap on his couch instead of against the hard plastic tables at the library, that he thinks it’s empty staying up all night at the kitchen counter, turning back to where the couch is and seeing no one still awake with him, that he thinks Junhui’s solution to problems by running away from the source of them isn’t so much a solution as it is an aggravation when Jihoon caught him in the afternoon after Wonwoo woke up from his nap and said:

“Hey, you know where Junhui went?”

Wonwoo, of course, didn’t know exactly, but he could guess. “No.” Pause. “Why?”

Jihoon rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his palm. “It’s not really anything,” he shrugged. If snapping at Junhui after finding out that he’d moved the clean dishes into the cupboard, where they’d probably ought to be, without telling anyone so that Jihoon spent half an hour looking for a spoon, wasn’t really anything. “I just.” There was a pinched look on his face. “Don’t think it should be like this. Especially during exams week.”

Wonwoo turned back to his laptop screen. “Okay.”

He didn’t know how to say that it shouldn’t have been like this since Junhui moved in, and he didn’t know how to speak of the tension that came with Jihoon being too straightforward and Junhui trying to inch himself around him to avoid conflict. That just ended up making the conflicts worse, and then Wonwoo’d come home to Jihoon raising his voice over a spoon and now they were here, and Junhui was inching himself around their entire apartment.

He thinks Jihoon should tell Junhui _I’m sorry_ but then again, Wonwoo doesn’t know how to tell people a lot of things. So instead he tells Junhui, “Come home, Jun-ah.”

“Maybe,” Junhui says and laughs though there’s nothing particularly funny. Wonwoo thinks that, on the walk back, if he was the type to smoke cigarettes, he would want one right about now.

Later that night, after Wonwoo blinks awake from unintentionally falling asleep next to his laptop, there’s the plastic bag from Junhui’s convenience store that he didn’t pay for, full of instant ramen packets, and there’s Junhui, rustling through his notes on the couch.

He rests his head back on the countertop. Joonhwi, Junhui, Junnie, Jun. There’s always a sequence to these things.

Wonwoo thinks that there’s got to be more to this thought. And then he wakes up.

 

 

 

 

People ask a lot of weird questions when Wonwoo tells them he’s majoring in Literature.

“So,” Soonyoung says sometime around the first time they meet, which is during orientation because they live next door to each other in the dorm building. Wonwoo is a creature of habit, and Soonyoung is persistent, and somehow along those lines, they quickly become friends. “You wanna be a writer?”

Inside, Wonwoo says yes. Outside, Wonwoo says: “I guess.”

Wonwoo doesn’t think he’s so much a writer as just someone who writes. There’s different ways to consider it, but Wonwoo’s found the one that makes the most sense is this: imagine there’s as many species of writers as there are animals. Writers like his grandfather are one. People who write like Wonwoo are another.

And then there are writers that get published, and writers whose names end up on lists that Wonwoo looks up at every end of the year. Those are the kind of writers that have been weeded out from years and years of natural selection and pen to paper and fingers to keyboard to computer screen. Wonwoo’s only twenty-one.

Wonwoo has this thought every now and then when he’s typing his essays or staring down at a peer’s piece of work in class that once you get to that level of writer, the published-and-on-a-top-ten-list kind of writer, you write things out of nothing. Beautiful, beautiful things. _Sonagi_ -type things.

In comparison, Wonwoo thinks he lacks imagination.

“Are you ever gonna write about me?” Soonyoung asks him occasionally, when he’s forgotten that he’s asked Wonwoo before.

Wonwoo snorts in response. “You think my professor’s interested in reading about someone who games with Seungcheol until four in the morning and steals all his friend’s snacks?” He tugs away the bag of chips and sticks out his tongue when Soonyoung reaches for it back. “You wish.”

The thing is, Wonwoo probably has. There’s Soonyoung’s way of seeing the cogs turn in his eyes right before he’s going to tell a joke, Jisoo’s way of laughing though he didn’t fully hear the joke, the way Seungcheol eats chicken without repeatedly wiping away the sauce stuck to the sides of his mouth. There’s the story that takes place at the PC café ten minutes down the road from their university that he plays games with Jihoon at when everyone else is studying back at the apartment, and the story in an alley behind a convenience store where Wonwoo thinks they put the trash bins, and the list goes on.

It’s not like Wonwoo lets any of his friends read what he writes. Essays were different story – it was always a different story writing about books that weren’t your own, things that you didn’t look at and see yourself looking right back in – but Wonwoo keeps his own stories close to his chest, even if he isn’t physically holding anything.

“I bet it’s something dirty,” Soonyoung loudly whispers to Junhui the last time they’d bothered him about it, giving up on trying to get him to watch a movie with them when he was trying to finish a piece that he’d have to workshop in class the next day.

“No,” Wonwoo insists as Junhui breaks out into laughter. “It’s about aliens.”

“Am I in it?” Junhui asks, pointing a finger at himself.

Wonwoo turns back to his laptop. “It’s about aliens,” he repeats.

Junhui’s laughter softens and slows until it’s just a smile, and then a grin. “I hope you make me the most handsome alien in the entire universe!” he says.

Jihoon makes a point once, and this point is – “Isn’t the point of being a writer for people to read what you write?”

Wonwoo thinks about this in his concentrated writing class, when he reads his words at the small podium, paper shaking in his fingers. Wonwoo thinks about this on the train back from Changwon, staring out the window as the scenery flies by, head leaning against the headrest, and Wonwoo thinks that there are just some things you have to carry by yourself because they’re so deep within you that once you dig them up and hand them to someone else, once you’re suddenly staring at it in the face, Wonwoo thinks that he’ll start to feel the burn of tears in the bridge of his nose, every unsaid word threatening to spill over.

One time he tells Junhui very seriously: “I don’t know, it’s like someone asking you once you tell them that you study biology – ‘Oh, so you’re going to be a biologist when you grow up? Can I see all your dissections?’”

Junhui thinks that’s incredibly funny, for some reason. In general, Junhui finds Wonwoo a lot funnier than anyone’s ever told him he was, and that, in itself, is funny to Wonwoo. “Dissections and stories’re very different, Wonwoo.”

Everyone’s mind works differently, but Wonwoo thinks stories are like little dissections. Like how he thinks that letting anyone read his work is like cutting open a cadaver and examining each and every organ until everything’s been sliced with a scalpel and the cause of death has been determined. You can bury the body or cremate it, but once it’s cut open, things can’t be put back in the exact order that they started out in.

But in all honesty, Wonwoo’s forgotten the original question that prompted the entire conversation. All he remembers is that it ends with him scrunching his nose and saying, “I guess.”

What Wonwoo doesn’t forget is this: the story isn’t about aliens.

Instead, it’s about a boy who walks circles around the Earth until he reaches the sun. And on his way there, he stops at the East Sea with a jelly drink from a nearby grocery store, toes digging into the wet sand as he stares at it in the summer sky.

People have told this boy that there was no way to get to the sun by Earth. And this boy, for many years, has believed in rocket science and becoming an astronaut to make the journey there, and even if successful, he’d burn to a crisp.

And then this boy met another boy, who was living with his grandparents near the East Sea, who had a little makeshift bookshelf of books his grandfather gave him, who sweat into his sheets at night falling back asleep to the thought of _and if._ They become friends, for the time that the boy stayed at the East Sea.

But the boy walking toward the sun had to keep going because soon the boy would not be a boy but a man, and as a man, he’d have to do adult things instead of looking for the sun.

Before he went, the boy living with his grandparents asked, “What is your name?”

The boy going to the sun gave him four. In a sequence, like the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore.

This story is not about Junhui.

But it _is_ about Junhui, at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Junhui, who’s equal parts nice and equal parts pushover:

Wonwoo’s laying in his bed, covers up to his nose even though it’s one of the hottest days in the month, muffling his words. “Hey,” he says as Junhui’s shutting the door. “Are you…okay?”

Junhui uses the towel hanging around his shoulder to wipe his forehead. His hair is still wet from the shower. “Yeah,” he frowns, confused. “Why?”

“There’s a bunch of jelly wrappers in the trash can,” Wonwoo mutters. The true test to see if Junhui’s really listening is whether or not he asks him to repeat.

And he doesn’t. He lets out a loud bark of laughter, pulling the towel from around his shoulders to dry his hair. “That’s because I let Mingyu and Seokmin have them,” he says. “I let them try some first and they really liked it! So I just gave them the rest.”

Wonwoo thinks about the stash of instant ramen sitting in a lock-top box underneath his bed that he lets no one else but Junhui touch. He wrinkles his nose at the thought of letting one of Mingyu or Seokmin get to it. “Okay,” he mumbles, closing his eyes for sleep. Underneath the lights of their room, he sees the pink of his eyelids.

“No stress-eating for me,” Junhui insists. Wonwoo hears the creaking of Junhui climbing the rungs to his bunk. The light goes off and then Wonwoo can only see darkness and the sound of Junhui collapsing onto his mattress. “It’s summer!”

But the true beginning of summer is sometime in May, late enough in the month that the heat’s just starting to seep into the city and that Wonwoo’s starting to sweat when he’s sitting at the kitchen counter with his laptop while Junhui’s cooking. That’s when Junhui started to cook him the vegetables, the vegetables with more garlic in them than Wonwoo would like, but Wonwoo thinks it’s probably his fault for eating cup ramen in front of Junhui one too many times that he has to ask this:

“Is that your dinner?” Junhui suddenly says, staring at the ramen like it’s a cockroach. Or maybe more like a mosquito, because Junhui didn’t feel anything towards cockroaches and smashed the one that Jisoo and Jeonghan had found in the kitchen one night like it was no big deal. Mosquitoes, Wonwoo distinctly remembers after Junhui itched a bite on his shoulder, Junhui disliked.

Wonwoo glances up from his laptop screen. “Yeah,” he mumbles out of the side of the mouth that his hand isn’t propped against.

Junhui squints. “Didn’t you have that for lunch?” When Wonwoo nods, he continues. “Don’t you eat anything. Y’know. Green?”

Wonwoo considers mentioning that the flavor’s actually vegetable since that’s what was on sale this week but decides not to. “Tomorrow,” he shrugs.

“Do you want spinach?” Junhui asks, digging through the fridge and holding up the huge bag of leaves to show Wonwoo. “I’ve got a lot. And I don’t want you getting a vitamin deficiency or anything.”

Wonwoo hasn’t been to a doctor in two years, so maybe he’s already guilty of that. “It’s okay,” he says, stretching out his arms before turning back to his laptop.

Junhui rustles around to grab something else. He emerges with a bulb of garlic that he waves around in front of Wonwoo’s line of sight, and the movement pulls him so he’s back to looking at Junhui again. “Are you sure?” Junhui replies. “I put garlic in them and then go _shhhk!_ ” He imitates tossing them in a pan. “It’s tasty!”

Wonwoo just shrugs in response. When he opens the fridge the next day, there’s a plate of said spinach with chopped-up garlic cloves sitting on the shelf next to his coffee with his name written on the plastic wrap in blue pen.

And maybe before this summer started – before Seungcheol moved back to Daegu and Jeonghan, Jisoo, and Soonyoung all went home for break – Wonwoo would’ve never guessed that Junhui would leave a plate of vegetables for him in the refrigerator every time he cooked them. Maybe before this summer started and three new faces moved into their apartment for the month and a half, Wonwoo might’ve not hung around Junhui so much at all.

But if he really traces it back, it’s before this summer started that Wonwoo and Junhui became friends, tied together by Soonyoung before they’d spent so much shared time in the living room-kitchen area of the apartment in complete silence that that silence became comfortable.

Junhui’s not by any means quiet, but he’s not always loud, and he listens well in a way that Wonwoo, usually called quiet by all of their other friends, doesn’t. Junhui absorbs, and questions to help himself understand, but he doesn’t take control of the conversation like Wonwoo feels the need to, and he doesn’t change the subject until Wonwoo can’t remember where it even started like Soonyoung likes to.

But maybe that’s because Junhui is a pushover, and when Soonyoung asked him what he wanted to do for their joint birthday celebration, Junhui laughed nervously.

“I don’t know,” Junhui said, falling back behind Wonwoo so a cyclist could pass. He caught up with their strides afterwards. “Uh. Eat cake?”

Wonwoo opened his mouth to ask what kind, but Soonyoung beat him to the reply. “That’s it?” he laughed. “No karaoke, or going out to drink, or hanging out with your friends, Junnie?”

Junhui’s eyes widened. “Of course I wanna hang out with you guys!” he insisted as Soonyoung clutched his heart as an over-exaggeration of hurt. Wonwoo cracked a smile at that. “We can, like. Hang out and eat cake?”

Wonwoo was about to pose his what kind of cake question one more time, but again, Soonyoung beat him to it. “You’re a simple man, Moon Jun,” he sighed. “A simple man with simple pleasures.”

Wonwoo could be upset about it, but Soonyoung’s always beat him to a lot of things. Like:

“Hey, you’re,” he told Wonwoo when they were about to part ways in front of the train station at the end of their first year. He wiped at his cold-bitten nose, exposed to the winter wind. “My best friend. So don’t be a stranger and talk to me over break, okay?”

Wonwoo didn’t think that it had to be said aloud, but Soonyoung was a fan of the tangible, the able-to-hold-in-your-hands-and-know-what-it-is kind of thing. “You’re my best friend, too,” Wonwoo said, nudging him at the shoulder. Soonyoung laughed and Wonwoo waved to him until he was lost in the crowd and couldn’t be found in it anymore.

Soonyoung was the one who called him first over that break. Soonyoung was also the first one to say hi to Wonwoo when they first met, the first one to tell Junhui Wonwoo’s name, the first one to send Wonwoo a message last month after he’d gone home and Wonwoo had been inundated with assignments for his summer classes.

“So how is it?” Soonyoung asks when Wonwoo brings up the essay he’s supposed to be writing, but is ignoring in favor of talking to Soonyoung on the phone.

Wonwoo turns back around to glance at the blank document. “It’s okay,” he replies. He could speak about how he hasn’t read the pile of books sitting next to his laptop needed to do said essay, but he doubts Soonyoung cares. “Boring.”

“Oh,” Soonyoung’s static-y, not-so-far-away in Namyangju, voice comes through the transmitter. Wonwoo can usually guess what Soonyoung’s going to say next when they’re talking face-to-face. This time, the receiver distorting all the inflections of his voice, Wonwoo can’t tell what’s coming. “Well,” and it’s like a breath you take before you dunk your head underwater. “I hope you write better than you talk.”

There’s that moment once you hit the surface of the pool. For a split second, all Wonwoo hears is the water, and it’s the distant crashing of waves through the night, the stillness of the neighborhood pool sloshing in his ears. “What?” he says, maybe angrier than he should be. Than he wants to be.

“You’re always giving me these two, three word answers,” Soonyoung goes on. There’s distortion, there’s static, there’s a whole surface of water between them. “We talk – or I mean, I guess, _I_ talk, and then you.”

Pause. A quiet, muffled roar in the depths. “And then I,” Wonwoo repeats, tightening his grip on the phone.

“You say stuff,” Soonyoung raises his voice, impatient. “I mean – fuck. Wonwoo. We’re best friends, aren’t we? But you don’t tell me anything.”

There’s the sound of his laptop fan, whirring. “Bullshit,” he replies. When Wonwoo was very small, he remembers sharing the futon with Bohyuk, who ended up using half of Wonwoo's pillow at some point during the night, and his parent's cacophonous snores piercing the silence of night more than the whirring blades of the fan. “If you – ”

“I don’t know why you won’t say anything to me!” Soonyoung beats him to it. “I don’t – because I know there’s gotta be more. I know you’re not flunking out of your Lit classes so that means you’ve gotta be writing something. Why don’t you say that stuff to me? Why don’t you talk to me? Why don’t you let me read – ”

When Wonwoo was not that small, his grandfather had wiped away his tears. When Wonwoo had gone home in December, he’d wondered what happened to the thin papers his grandfather had scratched his words onto. When Wonwoo was twenty-one –

“If you were really my friend,” he hears himself yell into the receiver. “We wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation!”

– he didn’t know how to say how he felt aloud.

For a moment there’s silence. Distortion, static, a whole surface of water between them. Soonyoung’s really not that far away in Namyangju. “Oh,” his voice comes through the transmitter, faint. Hurt.

Wonwoo remembers tightening his grip on the phone, but then it’s falling out of his hands. When he picks it up from the countertop, his fingers feel numb and Soonyoung’s already hung up.

Wonwoo writes about a lot of things. He wipes his clammy hands onto the exposed skin of his knees and the sweat tries to meld them together. Wonwoo thinks he could write about this moment.

A quiet, muffled roar in the depths. His laptop screen’s gone black. Wonwoo doesn’t think he wants to.

 

 

 

 

Two days before his twenty-second birthday, Wonwoo dreams about goldfish.

When Bohyuk was in third grade, he’d come home from the school fair with a sandwich bag filled with water and two fish, wiggling around the tiny confines. Wonwoo remembers crouching down to rest his chin on the old coffee table that’d been replaced the last time he went home to get a better look.

“They’re cool, right?” Bohyuk preened. He’d lost his two front teeth earlier in the school year and the adult ones were still working their way in. Wonwoo looked away from the small fish eye glancing back at his two and nodded. The half grown-in teeth were the first thing he saw.

When Wonwoo looked back, the goldfish that he’d been staring at was on the other side. They circled around each other, pupils glancing around their respective sides, and then they’d circle back so Wonwoo was staring at the same fish again. And so it went.

Wonwoo doesn’t remember what happened to those goldfish. He also doesn’t remember if they bought a bowl and fish food for them, or if his parents flushed them down the toilet instead. If Bohyuk cried when he found out it happened.

In Wonwoo’s dream, though, those goldfish are still flickering around the tiny confines of that sandwich bag, the falling sun of late afternoon through the kitchen window catching on them, the little lights dancing off their scales.

And Wonwoo doesn’t remember it’s nearly his birthday until he’s sitting on the toilet cover brushing his teeth the morning before, Junhui’s bare feet pounding against the linoleum floor the way the downstairs neighbors complained to them about before, Junhui himself leaning against the doorframe to say, “So what’re we doing for your birthday?”

Wonwoo keeps brushing his teeth. It's only after he rinses his mouth, and wipes his face that he replies. All the while, Junhui’s still leaning against that door frame, bouncing on his toes. “I don’t know,” he yawns.

Junhui follows him to the kitchen. “Do you wanna go watch a movie? Play games?” They both know Junhui’s far from good at those. “Wouldn’t the beach be fun?” He waves his arms around excitedly before leaning against the sink as Wonwoo’s pouring himself a cup of water. “You wanna go to the beach, Wonwoo?”

It almost seems like it’s Junhui’s birthday, except Junhui wasn’t this excited for it at all. “I don’t know,” Wonwoo repeats, smiling against the rim of his mug. It has a bear wearing a pair of glasses on it. Wonwoo has to think of who gave it to him.

But Junhui’s not deterred. “Oh, I know!” he continues, his whole face lighting up. “There’s a bakery on the way back from the convenience store. I’ll buy you a cake after my shift! And then we can share it with Seokmin, Minghao, Mingyu, and Jihoon and sing you happy birthday together!”

Wonwoo’s having a hard time imagining Jihoon singing happy birthday to him. Even harder when, knowing Junhui, there’d probably be a party hat lying around somewhere. He’s still trying to construct the image in his mind when Junhui pokes his side. “Wonwoo,” he says, holding the last syllable extra long. “What kind of cake do you want?”

Wonwoo blinks. He thinks there’s been something he’s wanted to ask Junhui for a long time relating to the same thing. Cake. Birthdays. _Ah._ “What kind of cake do _you_ want?” he asks Junhui.

Junhui looks at him like he’s grown a third eye. Junhui looks at him like this only sometimes, not very often, and it’s when Wonwoo says something that’s funny to him, not the kind that he’d laugh at. “It’s _your_ birthday,” he reminds him, in case Wonwoo’s managed to forget.

Wonwoo doesn’t tell them that he had, but that he remembers now. “I know,” he shrugs. Thinks. Junhui lets him, still leaning against the sink. “We only ate cake for your birthday.”

Junhui laughs. Nothing’s particularly funny about this, though, according to Wonwoo, but he's stopped giving Wonwoo the weird look. “But it’s not my birthday,” he reminds him again. “It’s yours.”

A lengthy pause. And then: “Let’s just eat cake.”

“You really don’t wanna do anything else?” Junhui deflates. “Not even getting dinner before eating cake?”

Wonwoo feels his forehead crease as he thinks carefully. “Well, all we did was eat cake for your birthday,” he says. He remembers going to the bakery near campus after class and guessing that Junhui’d like the strawberry one, and Soonyoung accidentally dropped it on their walk back so that the design got smashed against the top of the box. Junhui had just laughed when they took it out of the box for him later that night. There’s not much else to figure out.

Junhui presses his lips together, confused, maybe a little exasperated. “But Wonwoo,” he repeats, sans the drawn out syllable this time around. “It’s not my birthday anymore.” He’s waving his arms around again, more like someone who's calling for help, stranded in the middle of the ocean, than out of excitement. “It’s yours! And I’m asking what do _you_ wanna do, because it’s _your_ birthday!”

Wonwoo thinks Junhui’s the weird one. Because Junhui’s the one who only wants to eat cake on his birthday, the one who says _thank you_ even when all he gets is a lumpy couch and Jihoon glaring at him for the first nearly-two months of living together. The one who cooks Wonwoo vegetables with too much garlic even though he didn’t ask for them, the one who skirts around snails on the sidewalks in the morning, the one who buys him his favorite artificially blue dish soap using his employee discount as an early birthday present.

And Junhui _has to_ be the weird one because he asks Wonwoo what he wants to do for his birthday and Wonwoo's carried this thought by himself for so long that he feels his lungs burning from keeping it all in and it's that. He lets it out in one, over-loud exhale. “Well I don’t fucking know, okay?”

One time, Soonyoung made them stand back-to-back and, upon reaching up to put a hand on top of the space between their heads, proclaimed Junhui the taller one, much to Wonwoo’s chagrin. Right now though, as they’re standing face-to-face, eyes averted, Junhui looks so, so small from where he's leaning against the sink, folding into himself.

“Okay,” he says, voice so quiet that if this were nighttime and the rest of their apartment mates for the summer home, Wonwoo might’ve missed it. Lets out an awkward laugh. “I’m sorry.”

Wonwoo thinks there’s something he’s forgetting. “Junhui,” he starts, beginning the thought. Junhui’s going to their room, and Wonwoo’s still thinking about it. “Junhui.” He’s still thinking about it when Junhui emerges with his backpack and kneels down to slip on his shoes and tells him, _I’m going to work now, see you tonight, don’t wait up for dinner._

He’s still thinking about it when Junhui closes the door softly, when he walks into their shared room and sees Junhui’s work smock still hanging in the closet. When Wonwoo was twenty-one –

Soonyoung gave him the mug. The goldfish swim around and around in that tiny sandwich bag with no air holes. It’s hot outside for only nine in the morning, and Wonwoo’s already sweating. And so it goes.

 

 

 

 

(A continuation of Wonwoo’s story, not about aliens)

The irony of this story is that the boy walking to the sun has, in his collection of them, the name “Moon Jun.”

The irony of this story is that it is not about Junhui.

There’s creases at the sides of the pages from where he held them so tight in his shaking fingers.

It’s about Wonwoo.

 

 

 

 

Here’s how it always goes in Wonwoo’s dreams:

He’s on a bus.

Wonwoo doesn’t know where the bus is going, and he’s always sitting on the side so the sunlight’s a square in his lap, warming his hands. Outside the window are scenes, flying by – maybe Busan, or his old high school in Changwon, or the countryside where there’s a mountain, and the bus is taking him to the top, and the telephone poles and power lines look like toothpicks and thread. And right before he wakes up, Wonwoo squints and sees the beginning of the sea in the distance past the highway.

The seat next to him is empty. Always empty.

Wonwoo’s grandfather was a quiet man. Wonwoo never realized it when they spoke, but afterwards, laying in his bed halfway through the night, woken up by the heat with the fan turned off, he’d count the amount of time they’d spent in silence. They were quiet in the study, and above the whirring of the small fan and clinking of forks against the fruit plate his grandmother set out for them, Wonwoo could hear the distant crashing of waves against the sand like holding a seashell against his ear.

Wonwoo’s grandfather died the fall before Wonwoo started high school. Wonwoo remembers the crisp orange leaves cracking under his bicycle tires on the way home, remembers the silence other than their chopsticks clinking against the porcelain plates, remembers not feeling particularly sad about it until he turned off the lights and pulled the covers up to his nose. That’s when he started to cry.

 _I think he’d want you to have them,_ is what was on the note atop a beaten-up cardboard box, contents too heavy, in his grandmother’s pretty handwriting. The first book piled above many was _Sonagi._

But this isn’t Wonwoo’s dream.

Instead, Wonwoo buys himself two tickets and rides one bus to the main station. From there, he gets on the KTX to Gangneung, watching as the tall buildings of Seoul give way to the trees that sparse apartment complexes rise above, creating a sea of green clouds.

 _Sonagi’s_ a story about a young boy who lives in the countryside and girl that he meets. This girl plays in the stream that the boy walks past every day, and one day, when the boy doesn’t see her, he wanders down and plays in the stream like she usually does.

Turns out, the girl’s hiding and watching him, curious to see what he’ll do. The boy runs when he finds out, thinking he’s made a fool of himself.

Not long after, the boy and the girl decide to explore the countryside one afternoon. The boy picks as many flowers as he can for the girl, and they pick radishes to eat, even though they don’t taste good. It’s only after the boy tries to impress the girl by riding a calf that the rain starts, and the girl’s lips turn blue.

The boy learns that the girl’s sick and that her family has to move again soon. He takes some walnuts from a village orchard, the best of the whole village, and hopes to give them to the girl before she leaves. But he finds out the next day that she’s died from her sickness.

Wonwoo doesn’t cry often. If he really thinks about it, there’s only two distinct times he remembers – one, from reading _Sonagi_ and two, after his grandfather’s death. There’re just some things Wonwoo finds he has to carry by himself, lest he loses his grip and they threaten to spill over. And then Wonwoo’ll lose himself in the spray and brine of the crashing waves against the shore.

When Wonwoo nods awake from his nap, the last few people are filing out of his train car. Wonwoo’s more or less alone, and it reminds him that there’s something that he’s forgetting. He picks up his backpack that he haphazardly threw a book, his old pair of shower shoes that he knows can withstand the water, and his cell phone into and walks into the station.

There’s a crowd of people waiting at the exit. And watching them crane their necks for a better look at who’s walking out reminds Wonwoo that there’s this feeling that he’s been trying to put into words for a while now and has to do with this…

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, Wonwoo writes because he wants to control the narrative.

He waits two rings before Soonyoung picks up. “Happy birthday.”

Wonwoo laughs like a balloon carelessly let go by a child. Eventually bad for the environment. “It’s tomorrow,” he reminds him, though he doesn’t think Soonyoung’s forgotten.

“I know, I know,” Soonyoung confirms. “I just wanted to be the first to say it.”

“Oh.” Silence – distortion, static, a whole surface of water between them. But then there’s a little girl chasing after her mother’s legs outside the train station, wailing to hold her hand, and it brings Wonwoo back to this moment. “Aren’t you mad at me?” Wonwoo asks, and it makes him feel like that little girl whose mother’s reaching down for her outstretched fingers.

He listens as Soonyoung sighs. “I could still be,” he laughs eventually. “I mean, yeah. I definitely was.” The laughter peters out. “But it’s _weird_ being angry at you. We’ve never been angry at each other before, so it’s like I didn’t even know what to do.”

“Well,” Wonwoo smiles. “You better get used to it if we’re going to be best friends.”

Soonyoung laughs again at that. And then: “What’re you doing right now?”

Sometimes, Wonwoo writes because he wants to control the narrative, because there’s something that he’s forgotten. He thinks he’s starting to remember what it is. “I’m at the East Sea.”

Soonyoung whistles. “Junhui’s idea?”

“No,” Wonwoo says, looking around. It’s not like Junhui’s here. “Mine. I’m in Gangneung.”

“Seems like something Junhui’d wanna do,” Soonyoung replies. “But why Gangneung?”

Because Wonwoo’s grandparents lived near the East Sea, but not in Gangneung. Because Wonwoo’s been dreaming of the distant crashing of waves ringing through the night in his dreams, the salty smell of the spray lingering in the air after his grandfather turned off the fan that he’d focused full-blast towards his bed. Because Wonwoo remembers that Junhui’s the weird one, that Junhui’d like to take the bus and the KTX for the destination, that Junhui asked him _where do you actually wanna end up?_ and Wonwoo’s answer was, rewritten a thousand different stories around –

“I wanted.” He pauses, starting to feel the burn of tears in the bridge of his nose, the unsaid words threatening to spill over. Wonwoo’s carried this thing by himself since Junhui slammed that dish soap in front of him. It is very, artificially blue on Wonwoo’s white plates, when he washes them.

“You wanted.” The feeling is that there’s an entire ocean stuck in Wonwoo’s lungs, distorting the words in water. The feeling is that Junhui has so many names, and that Wonwoo suddenly craves the taste of Junhui’s too-much-garlic stir-fried vegetables.

“I wanted Junhui to be here with me.”

That’s what, Wonwoo realizes, he was forgetting.

 

 

 

 

There’s always a sequence to these things.

Wonwoo dreams. Wonwoo wakes up. Wonwoo forgets. And then, Wonwoo thinks and thinks and thinks about what he’s forgotten until he falls asleep. And so it goes.

It’s midnight when Wonwoo gets back to the apartment. It’s strangely dark until he opens the door to his room and sees Junhui on his phone still, the bright of the screen illuminating his nose and not much else.

Wonwoo takes a deep breath. He wonders if Junhui can see him in the darkness. “I’m sorry,” he says. His own voice sounds almost too-loud in the unusual quiet for their apartment.

Junhui drops his phone on his face. “Wonwoo,” he mutters sleepily, and Wonwoo sees his shadow sit up in his bunk. He presses the home button for his phone before locking the screen again. “Wonwoo…happy birthday.”

Wonwoo blinks. He checks his own phone. It’s 12:18, and he’s officially twenty-two years old. “Oh,” and then he laughs, though nothing’s particularly funny. “I’m sorry.”

He hears Junhui hum in acknowledgement. “I know.” There’s the sound of blankets rustling and then stillness. “I bought you a cake, by the way. Same one you got me,” he yawns, and Wonwoo’s eyes have adjusted to the dark. “Because it was pretty tasty last time.”

Wonwoo bangs his elbow against his dresser as he’s changing his shirt. Beyond his own hiss of pain is Junhui’s soft laughter. Yup, Junhui’s still weirder than him.

Because Junhui’s the one to accept Wonwoo’s apology too easily. Junhui’s also the one to buy Wonwoo the cake he wants to eat instead of getting what he thinks Wonwoo wants, though Wonwoo doesn’t really mind, and the one to stretch out and bang his elbow against the frame of his bunk, whimpering in pain in response. Wonwoo laughs this time.

“I’m sad that summer’s ending,” Junhui says just as Wonwoo’s climbing into bed, pulling the covers to his nose. It’s still as hot as it was when break first started, and the bathroom vent’s still broken. The only difference is that in two weeks, Mingyu, Minghao, and Seokmin will be gone and Jeonghan and Jisoo will come back, and Jihoon will be back to staying awake for nights at a time.

But before that: Wonwoo wants to go to the East Sea and watch the waves crash against the shore. Wants to buy an ice cream from a nearby grocery store. Maybe a pack of jellies to share.

“What do you mean?” Wonwoo asks, feeling his lips turn up into a smile. Joonhwi, Junhui, Junnie, Jun. He’s never truly forgotten.

“It’s only just begun.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- title inspired by [this quote](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/766873-my-dear-in-the-midst-of-hate-i-found-there)
> 
> \- _Sonagi_ is a Korean short story. you can read it [here](http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Shower.htm)


End file.
